Every individual of an organization is responsible for its growth, from the email marketer who creates the campaigns to the engineer who manages the systems that send them. The popularity of “growth marketing” strategy illustrates this desire to accelerate business, but what is growth marketing and how can it be applied to improve email performance?

Having a growth mindset, rather than one that is fixed, means understanding that it is always possible to better understand your customers. People’s preferences are not set in stone, so it’s critical to possess a spirit of self-improvement around your tools and tactics.

In essence, growth marketing is all about coordinating all the channels at your disposal to increase user engagement, and email has been proven time and again to be the best digital channel for ROI.

Much of what is discussed in business is user acquisition, the strategy of gaining new members of your audience. But once an email address has been obtained, it’s up to you to keep users interested.

Regardless of your role, you can practice growth marketing by improving these three metrics to increase user engagement.

Open Rate – Obviously, emails can’t be opened if they’re delivered to the wrong place. Technical operations teams and email marketers alike understand that deliverability isn’t just about email acceptance, but also about the right inbox placement. Get started on the right foot with customers by ensuring that your content doesn’t land in the promotions tab, or worse, in the spam folder.

Click-to-Open Rate (CTO) – Unlike click-through rate, which measures the total times a link was clicked, CTO more effectively determines user engagement by only calculating the number of clicks from opened emails. According to industry benchmarks, email pros should expect a 25-40 percent click-to-open rate.

Unsubscribe Rate – Though few of us enjoy seeing unsubscribes to our emails, they do serve as a sort of “tough love” that helps improve overall list quality, as well as a learning opportunity for fine-tuning content. Setting up an email preference center is the key to reducing your unsubscribe rate, which should not exceed 0.4 percent.

These metrics are key to understanding how to communicate with your users, but there are many more that must be considered.

Want to know how Iterable and SparkPost work together to support the email marketing needs of B2C companies? Visit iterable.com to learn more or reach out to us to request a demo. We look forward to hearing from you!